


weigh your anchor

by sheepknitssweater



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: (Or Canonical Character Semi-Death as it Were), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Fake Marriage, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-03
Updated: 2018-07-11
Packaged: 2019-06-01 17:21:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15148088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheepknitssweater/pseuds/sheepknitssweater
Summary: Bucky falls; Steve crashes; Peggy finds Bucky. Years later, Peggy and Bucky find Steve.





	1. Bucky, 1947

So Bucky used to be a good actor.

+++

It's a National Cathedral wedding like something out of a picture book, and Carter’s all in lace and pearls and white roses like something out of a picture book, and she smiles up at him before he leans over to kiss her and Bucky just can't stop thinking about what a beautiful fucking couple they make. A Godsend to the press, definitely: attractive, photogenic brunets with a shared tragic backstory, what are the odds? If it was Steve in Bucky's place he'd be glaring like Captain America wasn’t supposed to, the way he’d always looked in pictures, in photo booth prints where Bucky would always start in kissing Steve's neck and Steve would blush while still half-trying to look at the camera like he was apologizing to the film, _don't mind him, really, he's always like this._ The pictures ended up terrible, Bucky's head a blur and Steve caught on one of his dumb one-eyed blinks.

None of that really matters, now. Steve’s gone and here’s Bucky, marrying a gorgeous woman he doesn’t deserve. Not all that different from the script Bucky knew they were going to end up following, if it didn’t work out: if the raids kept coming closer and closer together, if the fight went out of Steve’s lungs, if Bucky got so scared for both of them he up and fled. Sure, it’s a worst case scenario, but Bucky can live with a worst case scenario. You don’t fall in love with a kid who scrapes past death every other week if you aren’t the kind who can deal with worst case scenarios.

As they’re stepping off the altar, Carter gives Bucky’s hand a squeeze. Nothing romantic about it—friendly, maybe, but mostly professional. Mostly military. The squeeze says, _stage one complete. Stop smiling in twenty paces_.

Oh, is it ever. Oh, will he ever.

+++

The Bridal Suite’s massive, smells strongly enough of flowers and champagne to near knock Bucky out. (Which he’d probably appreciate, in some other circumstances.) Carter takes one look around before she half-throws herself onto the bed, letting out a sharp sigh as she bounces on the mattress. Bucky tries to stifle a laugh. “Stop,” she says, “you’re an awful husband already.”

“Unlike all the other shell-shocked homos in the world, certainly,” he replies, and she rolls her eyes at him, unabashed.

Bucky likes Carter. He likes her a whole lot. He wishes he were kinder to the people he liked instead of crueler.

+++

The funny thing is, the world isn’t that far off the mark about them. Most of the papers want badly to believe that they’re the answer to every question posed by war—what _do_ you do when your best friend dies? The man you’re going to marry? Found love in grief, Steve tipped the war in the Allies’ favor but _this too will be his legacy_ , they love each other so much, _so much_ , it’s what he would’ve wanted after all. And maybe it is. Steve thought a lot of Bucky and he thought a lot of Carter and if he knew a little less about each of them he’d probably think a lot of them together. Carter and Bucky, in any case, are doing their best. The cynical correspondents think they’re trying, not too opaquely, to fill up a shared empty space, which is about as close as anybody’ll get without the whole story, and Bucky is never, ever, ever telling anybody the whole story. And, God willing, neither is Carter.

Bucky wants Steve back; Carter wants Steve back. They’ve collectively got enough of him, at this point, to almost fill in the spaces. Carter’s a coverup and a smart, beautiful, practical one at that, so Bucky can screw around, if he ever wants to, and nobody will bat a goddamn eyelash. And now Carter won’t have to worry about skirt-chasers on top of everything else. It’s an arrangement, and not a bad one.

Exchange of goods and services. _Capitalism makes whores of us all, pal,_ Bucky thinks at the place in his head where Steve used to live.

+++

When reporters ask them whether Steve was trying to kill himself, they’re supposed to look devastated enough to make whoever said it feel the greatest shame of their lives. This does very little to dissuade the _National Enquirer_ , who, the day after the wedding, come out with an article comparing Bucky and Carter to Iago and Desdemona.

“Which of us is Iago, do you think?” Bucky asks, over coffee for him and tea for Carter.

She narrows her eyes thoughtfully. “Well, from what you’ve said, I gather it wouldn’t have been out of the ordinary for him to choke you.”

Bucky laughs so hard he tears up.

+++

They’d both rather forego a honeymoon, for obvious reasons—Carter wants to work, Bucky wants to lie on his back in a dark room and chain smoke, neither of them wants to fuck—but Bucky’d also rather no one realized their marriage is a sham before it even starts. So they go to Paris.

It rains most of their stay. Thursday, though, the sun comes out, and they take a walk arm-in-arm. Nobody smiles at them, which is more of a relief than Bucky could have ever appreciated before.

The Luxembourg Gardens are so green it hurts Bucky’s eyes a little, especially with Carter in them. She looks lovely, _so_ lovely, and she’s smiling so convincingly: eyes crinkling, teeth showing between red lips. Bucky hates himself for not enjoying it almost as much as he hates himself for not letting Carter enjoy it.

He’d told Steve that there was nothing unfair about the dates, way back when, because they were just that—dates. None of those girls _had_ to watch Bucky pull his usual bullshit: averting or closing his eyes at any physical contact, ducking out early because he wanted to see Steve and could get away with it, talking to his girlfriends like they were friends. They _were_ friends, many of them. Bucky liked the company of women then, as now. Just not in the way they signed up for.

But that was okay, when it was dates.

Carter’s signing a long-term goddamn contract. And Bucky likes her company. He likes her company a whole hell of a lot. But.

Steve wouldn’t like it. He would probably hate it.

There’s a moment where Bucky thinks he’s going to black out, really, he honestly thinks he’s going to crumple to the lawn in the fucking Luxembourg Gardens on his honeymoon, because Steve’s gone and Carter’s stuck here and this is how it’s going to be for the rest of his life. Briefly, it doesn’t seem important that Carter wants Bucky even less than he wants her, that Carter gets as much safety out of this as he does, that they _are_ friends, sort of, as much as either of them is capable of being a friend to anyone now. Bucky feels the self he used to have, the one that formed under Steve’s watch, withering. He didn’t realize at the time how tolerable that self was, how little he truly hated it. Steve loved that self, and Bucky trusted Steve’s judgment more than he trusted anything else in the world. Bucky has never labored under the delusion that he himself is a good person, but he’s known for as long as he can remember that Steve was a good person, the best. Steve wouldn’t love someone irredeemable.

Unfortunately for Bucky, the redeemable someone he used to be seems to have bled out back in the Alps.

It isn’t news to Bucky that he won’t be happy again, probably ever; it’s not something a million other people don’t know better than he possibly could. But the fact still makes Bucky wish with a cutting clarity that his body had died with the part of him that mattered. That he weren’t a fucking cockroach, burrowing headless in flesh he has no right to.

Something flashes across Carter’s face, and with that, Bucky’s back in the garden with his beautiful wife and their beautiful rings and the beautiful gap that looks a lot like the Cap they knew, unrecognizable to the rest of the world. Bucky smiles, sits down, and takes her hand.

+++

He used to have a whole inventory of plans B: ways to force survival on Steve, whether or not he liked it. Get Becca to marry Steve. Get the one nun at school who used to like Steve to help out. Have the girls from the bar check in on him. Have the guys from the bar check in on him. Have everyone from the bar check in on him, taking turns, priority given to those with medical training and/or common sense. Leave Steve a stash of more money than Steve would think he could possibly spend. Keep some hidden, so Bucky could have someone else retrieve it and give it to the hospital if Steve was refusing to pay for what he needed to get well.

Before he left, Bucky secured all of these. He got most of them in order as soon as they found out about Pearl Harbor. Bucky wasn’t prescient, but he was scared, always had been, and fear led you down the right path as often as the wrong. This time, he’d happened to be right.

The night before Bucky first shipped out, he pushed their twin beds apart before Steve fucked him—Bucky didn’t want to wake Steve up moving them. So they slept together in one, Steve on top of Bucky the whole night, Bucky clutching to keep him from falling off. Bucky couldn’t fall asleep, and he knew Steve wasn’t asleep, either, knew his deep breaths were just the product of him trying to fool Bucky. Around three in the morning, Bucky whispered, “hey,” and Steve said, “you’re awake,” and Bucky said, “marry me.”

He and Steve had had this conversation before: Steve’s _I’m not your wife_ , Bucky’s _but would that be so horrible_ , Steve’s _we’re more than that_ , Buck’s _we’re more than what? Normal?_ But this time, instead of arguing, Steve just pressed his face against Bucky’s neck so hard Bucky thought it might bruise. Like Steve was trying to get through to him, into him. Like Steve was trying to make them conjoined. “Already done,” he said.

Steve gave Bucky his mother’s ring. It didn’t fit, of course, but Bucky kept it on his dog tags for the whole war.

It’s still on his dog tags now. That, at least, is true: Bucky’s a married man. Not to Carter, but to someone.

This makes him feel better, when someone calls Carter _Mrs. Barnes_. They’re wrong. She isn’t Mrs. Barnes at all.

+++

They buy a brownstone on the Upper East Side, which is what people in their position do. That doesn’t mean Bucky has to like it.

“This is bullshit,” he says, looking out the window. Everyone he can see is wearing at least one fur garment. It’s _May_ , for crying out loud.

Carter walks over from the mirror to glance over his shoulder. “I thought you appreciated luxury.”

“I do. I don’t appreciate dying of heatstroke.”

She half-smiles. “Some people go to great lengths for status, don’t they.”

_Ouch._ “Hey.”

“I’m not exempting myself,” she says, and holds the tweezers she’s using aloft. “My eyebrows have been in stinging pain since I was thirteen years old.”

“I didn’t even _shave_ when I was thirteen.”

“Lucky you.”

They go for walks in Central Park. They buy expensive furniture, or have it bought for them. Bucky sees his sisters: Becca’s all grown up, Judith halfway there.

He sees his parents, too, but finds he has nothing to say to them, nor they to him. For them, he’s died three times: first when he and Steve moved a distance so far from the Barneses that no one could mistake it for an accident, second when he went to war, third when he fell. He’s some special kind of undead, and they didn’t even like him much alive.

At least they aren’t mad about the Episcopalian wedding—the fact of Bucky’s marriage is too miraculous to nitpick.

“That was pleasant,” Carter remarks after dinner at the Barnes’s. Bucky’s driving them home in the Dodge. He’s a very good parallel parker.

He cuts a glance at Carter. “They’re a barrel of laughs.” After swerving around a stopped cab, he turned to her. “Thanks for not bringing him up.”

“It’s no great inconvenience,” she says. Then, a block later: “They haven’t changed their mind about him?”

He hacks out a laugh. “He’s still the fairy their son followed around for twenty years. Only difference is, he’s a decorated fairy now. Which is a change, since he was never much into drag.”

Now Carter laughs, short and sharp. “The costume didn’t help matters, I imagine.”

“Probably not,” he says, pulling up to their house.

They sleep in separate rooms, because, as it turns out, pretending your boyfriend isn’t your boyfriend is much harder than pretending your lawfully wedded wife is at all your wife in spirit. Also, Carter finds the smell of cigarettes totally noxious, and there is no force on earth strong enough to make Bucky stop smoking in bed.

He doesn’t drink in bed. He and Carter drink, together, in the living room. She gets quieter the more she has. Bucky doesn’t get much of anything, except slightly calmer and, eventually, asleep.

+++

Steve was always good with the really sauced stragglers at the bar. For some reason, his schoolmarm-severity was comforting to them. Steve was only a bartender, but lots asked after him, on the nights they were too sloshed to look for him themselves. Those rare times Bucky filed in, he’d tell them, “Rogers is at home with a very important ad assignment.” The bolder ones asked, sometimes, “do you know if he’s taken?” Bucky would cross his arms and ask them, “who do you think’s posing for the ad?”

It was a life. So long as their bodies didn’t fail them, so long as no one they couldn’t take came after them, so long as Bucky’s job kept him on and Steve’s jobs kept coming in—it was a life they could’ve lived forever.

+++

Carter stays in the SSR. Bucky, stupid bastard that he is, stays in the army.

She tries to talk him into joining her until he tells her the truth: he’s done with anything unnatural. Machines that do what machines are supposed to do—move, make, kill—he can handle. Nothing else. Nothing that gives you a huge new body you don’t know your way around. Nothing that glows blue and makes your brain feel liquid-bright. He knows he’ll end up strapped to an operating table again the second he wanders too close to one. Better this: an engineering job he got out of pitying awe or awed pity, guys in dress uniforms drinking scotch out of carafes, a commute through the Village that he resolutely ignores.

He’s lucky it’s his left arm that got fucked up in the fall, because he can still shoot a gun just fine. Not that’s he’s shooting at anyone in particular, here in New York. But it’s a good skill to maintain; he can’t imagine it’ll be long before he’s using it again.

None of the other Commandos stayed military, and none of them live anywhere near the city. That’s okay. He likes the dress-uniformed day-drinkers fine, and they’re too afraid of him not to like him back. They don’t examine him too closely, which is good. In a funny twist, he’s gotten much worse at pretending since Steve died. He hasn’t glanced at breasts deliberately since the middle of the war. When Steve comes up—which he does, rarely but inexorably—Bucky knows very well what his voice does. He knows what a widower looks like, and he knows it’s him. The clammy, sallow thinness of face. The strain involved in making any expression at all. The meanness dampened by exhaustion.

But they don’t care. The ones that suspect him only suspect him of betraying Steve by marrying Carter. “His best friend’s girl… I don’t care how good-looking the broad is, that just ain’t right,” Bucky overhears one saying in the breakroom. He has to lock himself in his office so everyone doesn’t hear him laughing hysterically.

Everyone Bucky knows calls him Barnes.


	2. Steve, 1955

****Steve knows it’s a dream, when he opens his eyes, because Bucky’s sitting next to him. He shuts his eyes against it. This is a dream he’s had before.

But the Bucky in Steve’s mind sees Steve wake up, his flicker of sight. “Steve,” Bucky says, sounding like he’s speaking from the bottom of a deep well. Dreams do that: this Bucky always sounds desperate. Steve used to relish that serrated edge of need in his voice—secretly, guiltily, but he relished it all the same. It was the raw flip-side of Bucky’s mannered care, his chastisements and antiseptic-scrubbings of Steve’s knuckles. The diffuse warmth of that love, when honed, became a beam with burning strength. It was not safe, and it was not kind, though Bucky himself was both safe and kind. Steve was neither, and it thrilled him to know that he was huge enough in Bucky’s heart to change the way he loved. Even if it was for the worse. Maybe—and this was horrible, this was the worst of all—maybe especially, if it was for the worse.

Steve doesn’t want Bucky’s desperation anymore. He sees, now, that his infected love killed Bucky. Steve’s dreams have made sure he won’t forget it. Every moment, there’s another Bucky, a parade of beloved men sick with Steve’s wrong.

So: this probably isn’t dreaming. This is probably just Hell. But it’s not as if Steve has any way of knowing.

“Steve,” dream-Bucky says again, and this time, he’s weeping. His face is pressed against Steve’s body. His tears soak the undershirt stretched over Steve’s huge chest.

This is the aftershave Bucky wore before the war. Steve’s never had a dream where his own body was new, but Bucky’s smell was old. He wonders, idly, what new horror his mind, or God, or whoever’s in charge of this lawless space inside of him, has devised.

He feels Bucky’s mouth against his chest. Not sexual; reverent. Small mercies. Steve hates himself for the sex, here, more than anything. It’s idolatrous, and it won’t stop. He’s as weak as he’s ever been: can’t scrub away the sense-memory of coming inside the man he killed. He can’t even stop wanting it. Steve’s tried to poison himself to the feeling of Bucky’s body, but it’s a desire too strongly ingrained. Like a song learned as a child. Like Psalm 39.

 _Behold thou hast made my days measurable_. What a gift those were, measurable days. What a gift, to have a place in time. To have a birth behind and a death ahead.

“Steve, please.” Bucky’s hands are on his face. “Are you awake? Please wake up, sweetheart. Please.”

Bucky’s hands _are_ on his face, but they feel very little like Bucky’s hands. The calluses have changed. Writing bump, trigger finger. Not the rough scrape of labor-hardened palm.

What’s happened to his palms?

Steve gives in and opens his eyes. Whatever horror awaits him will bide its time as long as it has to; he might as well get it over with.

This is a strange nightmare.

Bucky looks like he hasn’t slept in a week. They’re in a hospital. Pneumonia memories, maybe—but Bucky looks halfway between himself and his father. The bags under his eyes have the weight of permanence, driven in like scars.

He’s weeping. At least he cries the same, in short gasps of swallowed sobs. Bucky was always self-conscious about it—he said he cried like a girl. He told Steve, once, that he envied how Steve could sob motionless, expressionless, face barely wet. Steve didn’t know how to tell him that pain felt, for Steve, less like overflow then like a heavy settling. Pavement over mud. An airtight seal to keep himself within himself. He had never deluded himself that he would someday have the relief of a thaw, no matter how hot his anger ran.

Steve doesn’t bother to resist, now: the thing’s in motion. “Bucky,” he says, his throat thicker with disuse than it’s ever been. He doesn’t stop to consider this; instead, he pulls Bucky flush against him, chest to chest. His grip is fierce. Steve hates the sex, but he’s stopped resisting simple contact, this acknowledgement of memory. It would be wrong to push Bucky away. He’s pushed Bucky away enough.

Bucky, feral-eyed, is clutching at Steve now. He moves to kiss him, then freezes, whips his head around to check the door. He seems to weigh his urge to lock it with his unwillingness to let go of Steve. This is the most desperate he’s _ever_ been—even in real life, before the dreams, before the death. He comes to some kind of decision and rests his forehead against Steve’s, everything touching except their lips.

“Nurse’ll come in,” Steve mumbles, following his script. Whatever bizarre pastiche of a memory this is, he knows that nurses are a constant.

Bucky pulls back a bit, blinking hard. Steve can’t tell what his eyes are wide with. “You know where we are?”

Steve squints at him. “Brooklyn Hospital?” When Bucky’s eyes widen further, he guesses, “Kings County?”

Then Bucky just stares for a second. “Steve,” he asks slowly, “what do you think you’re here for?”

The script is rarely this complex—Steve’s never had much of a verbal imagination. “Pneumonia.” His own body’s hugeness doesn’t mean much of anything. It’s a dream, after all.

Bucky’s pulling back, his face unreadable but for some kind of fear. “Do you—remember the war? You crashed a plane, Steve.”

“Um. Yes.”

“You remember Carter?”

“Peggy? Of course.”

Bucky nods vigorously, then freezes. “If you… Steve, if you remember Carter, why the hell do you think you’ve got pneumonia?”

So Steve decides to pull the emergency lever. “This is a dream,” he says. “Something horrible’s about to happen to you. And killing myself doesn’t work in these. Only way for it to end is somebody killing me. I’d ask you to do it, but you never do. So I’m gonna find a doctor. Or someone.” When he tries to stand, he feels the pinch of an IV drip. He struggles with the bandaid, furrowing his brow. This level of detail is _really_ unusual.

Bucky grabs his shoulders. “You’re not dreaming, baby.”

Steve smiles thinly and tries to shrug Bucky off.

“It’s 1955,” Bucky finally blurts out, fingers tightening. “You’re alive.”

It’s not the words that do it. It’s the sound of Bucky’s voice. Steve’s mind would never be able to follow through on creating a Bucky who sounded that broken.


End file.
